When was plastic invented?
What did they intend on using it for at first?
WOuld it be better for the environment if they were no plastic?
thanks
I don’t think the last part of your question can really be answered; at least I’m not going to try. But I do think I can handle the first two portions.
According to my copy of the 13[sup]th[/sup] edition of Materials Handbook plastics are generally defined as that group of materials that are primarily non-crystalline hydrocarbons composed of large molecular chains. And it goes on for 15 or 20 pages delineating the differences in plastics, polymers, and resins. All of which are generically called “plastics.” And then we have the sub-types, thermoset and thermoplastic.
Anyhoo, the first commercial plastic was celluloid, developed in 1868, to replace the ivory that was then used in billiard balls. How’s that?
Didn’t celluloid have a nasty habit of exploding on hard impact? i.e. the impact of two billiard balls smacking into each other? That’s why they stopped using it. It was on the History Channel.
Uncle Beer’s got it right. There’s a lot about celluloid in James Burke – I think it’s in Connections (book and TV show). Celluloid was adopted rapidly for artificial collars and cuffs – they looked like starched cloth, but didn’t fray, and stayed clean longer. Then it was used for photography, replacing glass plates. It went on to become the basis for movie film. Unfortunately, it’s highly flammable (it’s made from gun cotton, camphor, and other scary ingredients). Projection involved placing this unstable substance near very hot lamps, which is how fires started. It was eventually replaced with cellulose acetate “safety film”.
If I remember correctly, Bakelite was the next plastic. It ended up being used for knobs and handles an such.
It’s a bit surprising that polyethylene was not the first or second. Conceptually, it’s the simplest in structure and the easiest to understand. It’s the “vanilla” of the plastics industry. They use it to “cleanse the palate” of extruders after they run, say, acetal plastic through the mill. (Acetal can have a shockingly adverse reaction with a lot of plastics when they get hot.)
Of course, one can make a case that latex rubber is the first polymer. It occurs naturally, and has been used since time immemorial for making crude “boots”. Goodyear’s development of vulcanization (cross-liking the polymer chains with sulfur) occurred long before celluloid as invented.
Ah, but rubber is an elastomer. While elastomers are polymeric, they are not usually considered “plastics.”
Unless you realize that polyethylene is petroleum derivative while earlier plastics were plant derivative. In the 1860’s, petroleum still wasn’t considered much good for anything. Later distilling processes helped seperated things out, but cellulose-derived plastics, while chemically far more complex than polyethylene (-CH[sub]2[/sub]- ad infinitum) are technologically far simpler, and availible to earlier technologies. And WRT to plastics nowadays, polyethylene is the chemically simplest(least complex), which has certain advantages, but the same process that makes polyethylene can be used, with different monomer units, to make polypropylene (-CH(CH[sub]3[/sub])-), polystyrene (-CHPh-), PVC (-CHCl-), etcetera, which while chemically more complex (more stuff to’em) are technolgically similar to make.